10 GIFs for Stats/Data People

Nope, this isn’t a gifts post, it is a GIFs post! It occurred to me this past week that one of the things I’m fairly well known for at work and in my personal life is my absolute dedication to gif usage. I send them as often as I can get away with at work (this shows up as “frequently employees novel communication methods to get her point across” on my review, if you’re curious), and I use them pretty regularly in personal emails, particularly around Fantasy Football/Game of Thrones Fantasy League Season. As such, it is a little weird that I almost never use them on my blog unless Ben’s involved. Well, that’s changing today! Here are 10 gifs that I use (or want to remember to use) in stats and data situations. While it will never have the market share of therapeutic geometry porn, I get a kick out of them:

When you’ve been sitting through a really boring presentation full of opinions and theory, and someone finally gets to some numbers and evidence:

When someone’s trying to walk you through some risk assessments, but you’re pretty sure they’re mucking with definitions, confused about probability and independence, and you just want to do the math yourself:

When you’ve been working really hard on a pet theory, and your data is on point, your effect sizes look good and…..no dice: Time to run a subgroup analysis!

When you see some amazing data well used and it just makes you fundamentally happy:

When someone in a meeting uses a ridiculous statistic they clearly haven’t thought through or don’t understand, and you need to send something to your coworker who you just know understands your angst:

When you’ve done every analysis possible, in every iteration possible, and you can’t find a significant correlation between two things, but then someone asks if you’re 100% there’s actually no relationship between the two variables and you start trying to explain p-values and all they hear is:

When you import your data in to a new file type and suddenly everything just goes haywire:

When you’ve been working for hours on your SAS/R code and you’re waiting for it to run and goddammit this better work:

When someone says “gee, I wish we had that data….” and you realize that you actually already pulled it together just for fun, and you’re so excited to say you have it:

…..and then when you realize this makes you sound like an absolute crazy person:

2 thoughts on “10 GIFs for Stats/Data People”

If this seems fishy to you, it seemed fishy to the Reproducibility Project too. They ordered a big replication experiment to see if they could confirm G&N’s study. The relevant paper was just published on PLoS yesterday, and we can all predict what happened next. Let’s all join together in the Failed Replication Song: